International gaming tournament won't let women compete

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Why are e-games seperated by genders, anyway? Of all the perceived differences in genders, is video game skill really a discrepancy?

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I’m confused, is it the global organization setting this stupid rule or just the people running the qualifying tournament in Finland?

Extreme upper body weakness. Male pinheads.

As one reply to this tweet said:

https://twitter.com/tavastiajones/status/484342281198387200

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I can see a justification for allowing a space for women to compete when they would otherwise be marginalized in an overwhelmingly male dominated space even thought there’s no physical reason why they couldn’t compete - there are women’s world championships in chess, snooker and darts and I believe that the ā€˜men’s’ competitions are actually open. Hopefully these would just be temporary until the open competition is a bit more equal.

A men only competition is just stupid though.

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As Vlad Taltos said to the lizard god, ā€œHow can you tell?ā€

It seems like a stupidly unenforceable rule, unless they are going to check inside everyone’s pants at the door or do DNA tests or something.

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Obviously, these deluded Finnish organisers think that males are not going to win a tournament open to everyone. So they’re organising a segregated tournament for one gender only. Just like in Chess.

Has Blizzard taken a position? If not, you should try to get them to comment.

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Question: How is it sexist to have one tournament for males and one for females? Their tweet said they are having gender-divided tournaments. What’s wrong with that?

There is no female hearthstone tournament (although there is a female tekken tag tourney with no corresponding male tourney).

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In that case, why use the words ā€œtournamentsā€. I’d say it’s likely they where about to announce one as soon as interest was drummed up but I am of course not 100% sure about this. It’s just what it looks like to me.

The same way it’s racist to have one baseball league for white people and one baseball league for non-white people. There’s no more reason to segregate video gaming by gender than there is to segregate other competitions by race.

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So you think there should be a baseball league for woman and men, competing side by side? Is it sexist not to? 'cause that’s what you’re saying, don’t involve racism in this topic, has nothing to do with it.

I really can’t think of any good reason to separate the sexes in a gaming tournament. Even what chess does with open tournaments and women-only tournaments seems kinda sexist to me, though I can understand why they do it.

I do have some vague recollection of a study where males had faster reaction times than females on average. Even if that translated into an advantage at the tournament level for twitch games, Hearthstone is essentially a card game.

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There is at least some rationale to segregate professional sports by gender: physiological differences between the sexes mean that the average female player will have a major disadvantage in upper body strength compared to the average male player. The same cannot be said for race.

What is the rationale for excluding women from a video game tournament, where physiological differences between the sexes have no impact whatsoever?

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Probably nothing at all - I don’t disagree on merging the esport leagues. I just think you hop on the racism train way to fast.

This is the most maddeningly stupid thing the gaming community has done since… oh, probably yesterday-ish.

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It seems to have been necessary to make what I would have thought was an obvious point: do we still have to explain what’s wrong with ā€œseparate but equal?ā€

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I’m not sure how physical differences in height, weight and strength - like in baseball or other sports - are applicable to gaming ?

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